Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Marrow Thieves, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Cyclical Histories, Language, and Indigenous Oppression
Family and Coming of Age
Humans and Nature
Trauma, Identity, and Pride
Summary
Analysis
Miig picks up where he left off on the night when Rose arrived. He says that the earth broke: the north melted, sea levels rose, and there was a flurry of tornados, earthquakes, and tsunamis. Pipelines broke and poisoned forests and lakes. Millions of people died, and the survivors migrated inland. Those in power refused to change. They made people work harder and longer as the sun disappeared for weeks at a time. People got sicker, stopped dreaming, and started to kill themselves and others. Many refused to work. Governments, churches, and scientists started to look for a cure to restore dreaming.
The pipelines that Miig refers to are likely the oil pipelines that run through North America, showing again how industry and harnessing the natural world in the reader's present could later prove to be the earth's downfall. That the powerful people refused to change suggests that they felt they could dominate over the changing world rather than heal it, a stark contrast with the way the Indigenous characters conceptualize their relationship to the natural world.
Themes
People with money hired sleep counselors and hypnotists, and many people turned to Indigenous people like the New Agers once did, with openness and curiosity. When the Indigenous people refused to let others into their ceremonies, the white people started to look for ways to take the ability to dream and co-op the ceremonies. The government began to move Indigenous people off of their lands, just like in the past. The Indigenous people still had each other, so they weren't worried until the church and the scientists came up with the solution to the dreamlessness.
As in the cities, where poor people regardless of ethnicity were in trouble, the fact that people with money were able to get help for the dreamlessness shows how the changing world overwhelmingly affects those with the least amount of capital to change anything, while those with money can buy their safety. Protecting their ceremonies allows the Indigenous people to maintain their traditions and not corrupt them, like what happened to the landscape.
Themes
They first asked for Indigenous volunteers and paid people, but not many volunteered. They started pulling people out of prisons, and rumors spread that they'd come up with a way to pull dreams out of Indigenous bones. People were taken away and never came back. Miig says that it got to the point where the scientists needed more bodies, so they turned to history and looked at the residential schools to build new ones. Now, Indigenous people go to the schools and their dreams are stolen from their bone marrow. Indigenous people die, join the ancestors, and hope that there are enough dreams left in the world for the next generation.
Specifically, the fact that the places where the government extracts bone marrow are called "residential schools," just like the old schools, shows that what's happening in the novel's present isn't something new. It's clearly and undeniably connected to the past, and it's just one horrific event of many in which white settlers abuse Indigenous people.
Themes
